Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Monday January 11, 2010 @10:40AM
from the click-on-this dept.

gyrogeerloose writes "A test published by MOTO labs comparing the accuracy and sensitivity of smartphone touchscreens among various makers gave the iPhone top marks ahead of HTC's Droid Eris, the Google-branded Nexus One and the Motorola Droid. The test was conducted within a drawing program using a finger to trace straight diagonal lines across the screens and then comparing the results. While it's not likely that a smart phone user is going to draw a lot of lines, the test does give some indication of which phones are most likely to properly respond to clicking on a link in a Web browser."

I am a Droid user and ran my own experiment. I drew a bunch of lines in a drawing program and got waviness.

But what does this really mean? The Droid is not as good as the iPhone if you are buying it to use as a graphics tablet, but c'mon, who does that? I am able to use the web browser, keyboard, etc. with absolutely no problem. It seems to me that this article is just here to try to get publicity for the person who wrote it and the person that I will not name.:)

It reflects resolution, and shows 'dead spots' in the touch surface that the OS/Software must 'guess' as to approximate location. Granted it's not a very scientific test, but it does show some interesting weaknesses in the varous implementations. For instance, on an iPhone, you can click on a link that is only a few pixels in height and be relatively sure you'll get the correct link out of a list of links.

If you'll think back to the days of low resolution, when you were trying to fit a decent image into a 16x16 icon representation, you get an idea of what this may be showing. If the touch capacitance screen doesn't have a grid address for a specific spot you're trying to touch, it will have to guess between the two nearest points.

This is very similar to mouse resolution.

A more valid test would be to use a 'robotic' finger that could apply exact pressure across all phones, but it does give a decent general idea as to how they stack up.

I don't think anyone's fingers are slim enough to click on a link that's only a few pixels big since the screens are so small anyhow. These screens are small and made to be finger friendly, that type of accuracy is not needed I don't think.
For larger screen that are meant to be used instead of mice then that's a different story.

Then you haven't used the iPhone. I click on single character links regularlly. Normally page numbers or the next arrow for images. It is another ui design by apple. It goes to the closet link within so many pixels.

The droid I got to play with one day had hard enough time registering the unlock slide let alone clicking on page numbers. I will say however it displayed ars techincas mobile sitebetter than my iPhone. The droid didn't fix the damn font height but left it scalable. Along with not having to jailbreak to install myown apps are two big pluses. But at the end of the day the UI is more important than any other app. Good apps can't fix a bad ui. However a decent UI can make limited apps more usable.

And don't forget typing on the virtual keyboard. On my Nexus One, I find the keyboard is easily a match for my wife's iPhone 3Gs, but I do notice I have to apply more pressure than is natural to click on the small virtual buttons along the bottom of my Nexus One. Only a problem until you get use to it.

Overall, the most important app isn't the UI, but how good is it as a phone. My wife envy's my ability to recieve calls in low-points along the streets in our neighborhood. Next time I go to Europe, I'll j

This is it, really. Regardless of which someware development model a person loves, or phone manufacuring corporation, or internet search company, hardware vendor, or whatever else, there is starting to be some proper competition in the consumer oriented smartphone market.

I've had an iphone since shortly after they were launched. While there were things to complain about it was still the best smarthophone I'd ever used, overall. The longer I use it the longer the list of complaints I have, many of which are

So, why does it take companies who aren't cell-phone manufacturers to design great ones?

Heh. That's an easy one. Phone manufacturers and "phone companies" are still managed by people who think a real phone is a big black thing that sits on a table and has a rotary dial. They don't have one on their desk, of course, because their personal secretary handles that for them. They may have heard about the newfangled portable phones (most likely if they're managing a cell-phone company;-), but they've never to

Yes and no. It's just a cost trade-off. If the average contact surface for a 'light touch' finger on a capacitive screen is 2 millimeters (just an example as I don't know what the real average contact surface size is), then it wouldn't make much sense to have a resolution of.25 mm as you wouldn't need that fine of a resolution. If the grid points are too far apart so that only two points, or even worse, one point is activated, the drawn line will take a drastic turn to correct where it next sees your finge

I continuously tap links as small as 3 or 4px on my iPhone and it works well enough that I rarely bother zooming in on the page before taping the link.

My finger maybe 40px on a screen that high res, but it knows exactly where my finger is and can pinpoint the center of my finger to a single pixel with good accuracy. If you watch the video you'll see that the nexus one can only do this when you press firmly (which i rarely do on my iPhone). While the droid is, as the slashdot story says, never accurate and i

Anyone who is designing web content for mobile devices should not be making links that are only a few pixels in height.

Yeah, that's going to work. Like everything else in life, you have to make tradeoffs. Yes, clickable properties on your mobile page should be as big as possible, but you also have to factor in how much screen real estate you have to play with in total.

Actually this is more of a problem on sites that don't offer a mobile version.

It can be a problem even for the people building the "mobile" versions of web sites. The iPhone is a special problem, since its default browser likes to format pages for an arbitrary size, then shrink it to (sometimes) fit the screen. The result can easily be text and buttons that are only a few pixels tall. When you "unpinch" to enlarge it, it doesn't get reformatted to fit the screen; it grows to larger than screen size and requires left-right scrolling to read.

I've built a number of "mobile" pages that carfully avoid ever declaring a size for anything, with the idea that this gives the browser total freedom to format it to fit the screen. This works fine on most smartphones, but with the iPhone, it tends to produce font/button sizes that are either huge or tiny, and requiring 2-dimensional scrolling back and forth to read it all. There's a lot of discussion of this in various online forums, but no good solution that I've found. The best is to use a "meta name=viewport" tag to specify the screen width, but this only works for one of the two layouts, and the sending code can't know which layout the phone is using at the moment. Also, it'll break as soon as Apple releases an iPhone with a higher-res screen that's a different width. The basic problem is an old one: The server-side code can't correctly format things for a client's window, because there's no way it can know its size. HTTP could have included a field specifying the client's screen/window size, but that wasn't done. (If it's possible, I've never seen it, and I've seen a lot of HTTP and HTML headers.)

Of course, even better would be for web clients to sensibly reformat for the screen space it has available. (There's even evidence that the folks who designed HTML thought about this.;-) Many phones' browsers do this, but iPhone's browser doesn't even seem to try. If there's a way to override its default and say "format this for your screen's width", nobody seems to know the magic incantation to make it work.

Funny thing is that my G1 phone reformats automatically when I rotate or resize the screen. So do the couple of other rotatable phones that I've tested. You'd think Apple's devs would know how to do this, too. I wonder why they got it so wrong?

(One theory floating around is that it's intentional, to discourage the use of the iPhone's browser, and encourage people to write iPhone-only apps to do what could be done with a few web pages. I've seen no real evidence for or against this theory.)

You still want the device to work as well as possible on web pages not designed for mobile devices.

With its high resolution, the Droid is getting dangerously close to readability for a full web page...

I have noticed the problem mentioned in the article. It shows up for me as jerky scrolling. I love how the iPhone always scrolls smoothly and precisely with your finger. No other device has matched that, and I think the problem described in this article is why.

Was the program written to the same quality in all platforms? Or did they just slap together one quickly to get some juicy headline out? A more worthwhile test would be to go to the same websites in the same stock browsers and log the number of error clicks. Blah.

You could even that that point to another stage of abstraction. The OS UI, and by implication any style guides and applications, plays a key role in the requirements of the screen sensitivity. If your OS needs very precise, pixel perfect selections then you either need a highly accurate and expensive touch screen or a stylus, but if you design your UI around chunky buttons and screen sized-gestures then you can get away with a much less accurate and cheaper screen.

Well, I am not a fanboy but the methodology of this test is flawed: using your own finger is not precise enough; using only a one-sized sample of each phone is not really scientific; so is not using the exact same algorithms for turning the touch screen events into on-screen pixels. The list goes on. I wouldn't be surprised that the iPhone's screen is better but the video does not convince me.

It doesn't matter if a finger isn't "precise" enough. The purpose of the testing is to determine real life performance. So you should be testing with something as precise as you would use in real life. What does it matter if a phone can detect the exact position of a pen point, when it goes nuts trying to find the center of your fingertip. What matters is consistency. In that case, the methodology is wrong. A single human isn't not consistent enough, even over the number of repetitions shown.

As in, they take in whatever pixel input the system gives them and spit them out on the screen. "Quality" does not enter into it, because they are all using the same API's that just have the OS feed them a stream of points.

It's representative of the quality of touch accuracy you will have in other apps because they, too, will just look at what points the OS is presenting the user as having touched.

I have to admit that I am somewhat underwhelmed. I got the G1 shortly after it came out a year and a half or so ago, and the touchscreen definitely falls short of what it could be. It is FAR less responsive than the iphone's, and the accuracy could indeed be better. I was coming from a winmo 5 device, so i'm still incredibly happy with it, relatively speaking.

So the big question is whether or not all the manufs of android devices are using the same screen/screen chips, or if android has a fundamental problem interpreting data off the screen?

here saying I'd never use a touchscreen. Too inaccurate. I poo-poo'ed the iPhone when it was released and swore up and down I'd never leave Palm. Then, at an AT&T store I tried out an iPhone on a lark and I was blown away. I had an upgrade so I went to the iPhone immediately. I've had a chance to test a couple friends' Android phones since, and there's just no comparison.

The iPhone interface is absolutely transparent; it feels like "real world" physics is at work, not like you're using a user interface. The same suspension of disbelief can't happen on Android because the UI just gets it wrong or lags behind you motions way too often.

The touchscreen isn't great (even forgiving that it doesn't do multi-touch like iPod/iPhone). When you're browsing a regular web page (something the Droid is up to, with its nice screen and good browser), sometimes the links are just too close to resolve the difference between them. Lots of frustrating touch...back...touch...back action going on.

In order to unlock the screen, you can use a gesture to unlock it. About 75% of the time, it works fine but the remainder of the time the gesture is not recorded correctly. There's a few games (word search) that often have issues marking an entire word.

Only owning an iPod Touch, it's hard for me to do a side-by-side comparison since I don't do the same things with the droid as I do the touch. All that aside, I love the Droid.

In order to unlock the screen, you can use a gesture to unlock it. About 75% of the time, it works fine but the remainder of the time the gesture is not recorded correctly. There's a few games (word search) that often have issues marking an entire word.

Only owning an iPod Touch, it's hard for me to do a side-by-side comparison since I don't do the same things with the droid as I do the touch. All that aside, I love the Droid.

I'm also a Droid user. I rarely have issues with the lock screen. The impression I've had is those times that I do, it's because I was trying to do some one-handed thumb swipe or slashing at the screen. I'll have to pay closer attention but I would have a hard time at this point thinking that this test has much practical application to my experience. Of course, I also do not use an iPhone or other Android phone so I have nothing to compare to.

I do, however, miss the curved unlock widget. I prefer it over the newer, current linear one.

While it's not likely that a smart phone user is going to draw a lot of lines, the test does give some indication of which phones are most likely to properly respond to clicking on a link in a Web browser."

A "gaming-grade" mouse and surface might have better sensitivity but I won't likely see a difference in browsing.

I think your comparison is a little off. If you look at the differences between these devices I would say it's closer to comparing a modern optical mouse to an old ball mouse. From my experience there is absolutely a difference between those two devices when browsing the internet or performing any other precise task. Perhaps I'm exaggerating, but I always though "gaming-grade" mouse and surfaces were akin to putting v-tech stickers on the side of your car.

Although drawling lines might be important to some, what really matters to most smartphone users is how the phone responds to misclicks. Is it able to detect it and adjust accordingly? There is more to it then the accuracy of the screen. You are using your phone while standing or walking so even if the screen is 100% accurate you probably won't be. What kind of correction algorithm the phone has to compensate for that?
Of course creating a considerate test is too much trouble and just saying that the iPhone touchscreen is more accurate then Google's scores you plenty of apple-love.

It doesn't follow that a lack of accuracy from dragging in a painting app would affect click accuracy in a browser at all. For example, the accuracy could degrade the longer you hold your finger to the screen due to moisture building up on your fingertip or due to reduced capacitance as the blood flow is restricted.

If you want to test point accuracy then write an app to test that; don't test something completely different and then leap to a potentially inaccurate conclusion.

Their conclusion is perfectly logical: they have Yahoo Research listed as one of their "collaborators", and are apparently selling a system of their own [moto.com] which is Android-based but (in their opinion) better than the standard Android.

I have a Droid and I just tried drawing diagonals in a paint program on the phone. Yes, I did get the waviness. All that means, though, is that the Droid is not a good choice for a phone if you want to draw on it. I am still able to use the on-screen keyboard just fine and even in a web browser I never have problems tapping a link no matter how far I am zoomed out. This is definitely not a deal-breaker for me. That said, the only reason why I have a Droid is because of the physical keyboard and a pretty decent free ssh client. The kids draw on it but they couldn't care less how straight the lines are or not.

Eh, I have a Droid and I hate the physical keyboard. The keys are just too tiny - the on-screen keyboard keys are actually easier to hit.

I have an iPod Touch, too, and I'd agree that the iPod's screen is better. Just in terms of overall feel - the droid is actually more accurate when using the on-screen keyboard, but it's way too eager to click instead of scroll, meaning that when you're paging around through your contacts you'll accidentally dial people, and when dragging around inside of the browser, you'

No effect. First, the touchscreen resolution differs from the display resolution. Second, these tests are showing results at the image level, from a distance away. We're not talking about, say, the Droid displaying wiggles on the order of 1-2 pixels. The wiggles subsume a large number of pixels. Further, even though the iPhone has a lower-resolution screen, it makes excellent use of antialiasing. You can observe position changes that, on average, are less than the pixel pitch with such methods.

This test is the result of the combined hardware-software system that results, at the end of the chain, in the API providing the app with a position. This is what the test ought to show. It doesn't matter if Apple's hardware or software takes the credit for the improved positional accuracy since the end result is what counts. What it does mean is that if the benefits stem from the post-touch processing in software, Android ought to be able to make the required changes to improve things. Until then, though

Is whether other flavors of applications do their own "cheating" to compensate for this.

In the classic desktop keyboard/mouse arrangement, it is more or less taken for granted that the user will be able to accurately press any button, and put the mouse within a couple pixels of any target(with the exception of somewhat disabled users).

Phones with hard buttons and resistive/stylus touch screens more or less closely approximate this.

Capacitive screens, by contrast, are better for finger work; but rather less precise. This creates a strong incentive to write the software to be as silently forgiving of certain errors as possible. Drawing programs are hard, since there is basically no way(short of an artistic AI) to infer the user's desire. You pretty much have to make do with the best your screen can give you. With a web browser, say, you can fairly strongly assume that users are intersted in clicking on links, rather than just jabbing at inert text, and expand the link target area appropriately. Same thing with all the tricks that touchscreen keyboards use, silently expanding target areas in order to augment accuracy.

It is definitely useful to know how good the raw input is, and more accurate is of course better; but in a class of devices defined by fairly inaccurate input devices, the real question is how good the software's intepretation of the input will be.

That would be very true if touchscreens were purely a point-and-click (or aim-and-stab) input control. However, what Apple has tried to do with the iPhone (and the recent "Magic Mouse" is indicative of this trend) is to create a new human-device interface mechanism that depends more on natural and intuitive gestures than aiming and stabbing a specific screen area. Because of this, the ability to track finger movements consistently and accurately is very important.

If, on the other hand, your user interface depends on a literal translation of a desktop point-and-click GUI, designed to be used primarily with a mouse and keyboard, to a touchscreen input control; then, of course, consistent and accurate tracking is less important than detecting the precise region where pressure was applied at a specific time. But if that is the case, the problems are deeper than just accuracy.

If you spent five minutes looking at this outfit's methodology you'd realize that the test is sound, though perhaps a little exacting compared to real-world use cases. But what I love is that the first twenty posts or so basically all offered apologies for the Android phones and denigrated the significance of the test. They couldn't be better PR responses if Google and Motorola had drafted them. If you happen to use and like an Android device, why don't you just admit that it has a flaw and deal with it? God knows it probably isn't going to affect you under most usual circumstances.

I can't tell you for how long I was and still am pissed off about various missing features on the iPhone (auto-SMS, copy/paste, etc.) but I still like the device overall and use it. You don't have to hold this borderline view of the world in which computing devices are either God's work on Earth or Satan's playthings.

I was thinking the exact same thing, and if the results had been reversed and the Droid had been on top, we'd have had a flurry of posts talking about how the iPhone is an overpriced and inferior option.

I also have issues with my iPhone (lack of built in MMS initially, lack of cut and paste until recently, annoyance that you still can't sync up your ToDo items from iCal with the built in calendar app and have to rely on third party apps, annoyance that you have to manually disable wifi if are trying to use 3G in an area with a hotspot, where it will try to use that wifi, even if you don't have a password for it, or its one of those web login ones).

What's wrong with saying "the droid's touch sensitivity is less effective than I'd like"? It seems like droid users are just as zealous about their phones as they accuse iPhone users of being.

I was thinking the exact same thing, and if the results had been reversed and the Droid had been on top, we'd have had a flurry of posts talking about how the iPhone is an overpriced and inferior option.

And we'd have a flurry of posts talking about how insanely great the iPhone's user experience is or some other dismissive language.

What's wrong with saying "the droid's touch sensitivity is less effective than I'd like"? It seems like droid users are just as zealous about their phones as they accuse iPhone users of being.

Because I can't agree with it. Apparently the Droid's touch sensitivity isn't as good as other devices. But until seeing this test, I didn't realize it. It's not like there was this glaring issue and this test is the "aha" moment that explains it all (unlike, say, the Droid's camera and the focus bug). Would I like the sensitivity to improve? I guess. But I'm not sure I'd

Those are my points - and the same is true for the iPhone. It doesn't sync todo items from iCal, which didn't bother me for the first 6 months I owned it, until I actually started using them in iCal and found the phone lacking in that area. It's not a glaring flaw in the iPhone but it is an annoyance for me now (using a third party app to fill in the feature).

I don't see this touch screen issue as a major flaw of the Droid, but from the way people have come flooding out to declare the test flawed is just in

Yeah and look at the tags: applesucks and applefud. Both of which make no sense considering Apple has nothing to do with this outfit or its results, which happen to favor their "sucky" product. Hate Apple for all they shit they actually do, not just because they may have a slightly better touch accuracy on their phone.

One human drags his finger around a few touch screen cell phones and starts making what appears to be "statements of fact" about the quality and accuracy of those phones. Excuse me if I don't consider the results to be rigorous.

Look at how loaded the headline is. It definitely deserves to be here on slashdot, that's for sure. Go look for topics where the Droid beats the iPhone and you see the exact opposite in effect; people offering apologies for the iPhone or denigrating, etc.

If you spent five minutes looking at this outfit's methodology you'd realize that the test is sound, though perhaps a little exacting compared to real-world use cases.

It's not really that great of a methodology. First of all it depends on something that is very difficult to get right, consistency in pressure and accuracy of a human finger. Changing the pressure, position, or angle of your finger can drastically change which capacitive element is triggered on the screen. It becomes difficult to separate errors in the touchscreen from the inaccuracy of the tester's finger.

Secondly, there could be algorithms that account for the motion of the touch in order to predict the n

If you spent five minutes looking at this outfit's methodology you'd realize that the test is sound

I spent less than five minutes watching the video and I realized I had been wasting my time, because this "test" is an absolute joke. He isn't balancing his finger against a straight edge, he isn't moving it at a constant rate, and the results in the video don't correspond to the images on the web site.

Before I watched the video, I thought it had some legitimacy, as I got wavy lines when I drew on my Nexus One. But then I tried it with my finger against a pen laid diagonally across the screen, and it produced a perfect straight line, at every speed. The whole article is a fanboy blowing smoke, relying on the twitchy human nervous system.

I think Martin Sheen said it best:

Willard: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound.Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?Willard: I don't see any method at all, sir.

In examining the screenshots, and downloading a free draw program from Android Market (DrawNoteK) my results were the same as the iphones without even trying. My phone is a myTouch, which is also a HTC phone, that the articles results seem to favor over the Motorola, but as I got nowhere near the squiggly lines that they show in their screenshots, the whole thing is suspect.. I guess someone with a Motorola will have to try it themselves as well.. but for now I call BS.

"While it's not likely that a smart phone user is going to draw a lot of lines, the test does give some indication of which phones are most likely to properly respond to clicking on a link in a Web browser." I don't suppose they considered instead testing which phones properly respond to clicking on links in Web browsers?

It appears to be app-dependent. My Droid always seems to click just below where I touch on web pages, but the painting app I downloaded could draw very, very straight lines. The pinch-zoom browser from the Milestone has helped, and the leaked Swype beta is perfect.

"While it's not likely that a smart phone user is going to draw a lot of lines, the test does give some indication of which phones are most likely to properly respond to clicking on a link in a Web browser." I don't suppose they considered instead testing which phones properly respond to clicking on links in Web browsers?

That's harder to test reliably.

Is the user used to a particular device? I'm noticing different systems have different learning curves for aiming.

I'm used to my iPhone 3Gs that I got at release. It took a few days to get accustomed to typing/licking but afterward I was able to use that like a champ. I have big fingers, but once I learned where to click I can click on even small web links.

Recently I tried using a Nexus One and I'm kind of starting at square one such as when I first tried the iPhone. Using

My wife and kids all have Iphones and I've used them. I just got a Nexus phone and I love it. I agree with the summation that the screen is not as responsive as the Apple phone. It took me a bit of trial and error but I discovered that you must tap quickly to get the phone to respond well. If you are slow it often seems to ignore the input. This may be a software issue. I hope that it is, and that it will be fixed soon.

I haven't yet seen anybody else make the following observation so I wonder if it's just my phone, but the audio level that comes out of the Nexus is noticeably lower than what comes out of the Iphone. I can turn the volume on the thing all the way up and it is still very weak in comparison. This applies to both ring tones and multimedia audio. This is more likely to be a hardware issue so I will not hold my breath waiting for a fix.

I have a Droid Eris, and as a guy with bigger hands that usually has trouble with these kinds of devices, I have to say I'm very happy with the accuracy - I almost never make a mis-click, even typing quite fast on the touchscreen keyboard. However, I'm disappointed in responsiveness. The interface reminds me of playing an online game on a shitty internet connection when your roommate is loading a new YouTube video ever few minutes - without warning, for no apparent reason, and rarely in doing the same action twice, a click / tap will take up to 2 or 3 seconds to register. It's accurate, sure, but that's meaningless when I can't tell whether the thing is froze up or it just didn't detect my click, and don't dare click again for fear of accidentally clicking whatever happens to be in that same spot on the next page if the first click did register.

I have a Droid. The browser always seems to click the wrong link - usually too low. The Android keyboard was marginal. The HTC keyboard was better. Swype is perfect. Most of the other apps are pretty accurate. I downloaded a drawing app and got nice straight lines. Given the amount of effort Apple put into the iPhone OS, it's not surprising that they have a better UI. I wouldn't be surprised to find that the curvature at the edges of the iPhone screen is an intentional eff

True, but as pointed out above, they weren't testing the accuracy of clicking links on a webpage; they were testing the accuracy of tracking finger gestures, which seems to be the new trend in touchscreen devices.

The legitimacy or how real world it applies aside, I'm disappointed with Motorola on this one. The Droid is an expensive device from a brand name manufacturer made in 2009. I expect a level of build quality, feature set, and accuracy. For a capacitance touch screen released in 2009, I would expect a level of accuracy that's at least comparable to the last generation of the iPhone, not accuracy that's poorer than a first gen iPhone.

Coming from resistive touchscreens on Windows Mobile and Palm devices and the device in general, I am overall pretty happy with my Droid. I do have inaccuracies from time to time, but it's ok. Using the onscreen keyboard has been pretty accurate; most of my errors I have attributed to my finger being in the wrong place. Sadly, this is another weapon for the annoying Apple fanboy; pissing contests are annoying and the constant Apple fanboy counter argument of being about to talk and do data at the same time is getting really old and doesn't apply to how I generally use the device.

First off, I have both a Droid and a 32GB iPod Touch. Frankly, I like the touch on the Droid better than the iPod - I find it more responsive and more accurate when playing the same game or browsing the web on both devices. It may just be my perception, but I simply find myself becoming less aggravated with the Droid's touch screen than the iPod's.

While I don't have the iPod with me right now, I do have my Droid and was able to try this experiment. I used an app called 'Simply Draw' and was not able to repeat their results. Every time I try, I get lines that are as straight as my finger can make them. I have yet to produce lines like those in the article no matter how hard I try - even using multi-touch to draw 2 lines at once works perfectly.

One problem I have noticed with the Droid that may be the cause here is the touchscreen is very sensitive to noisy power supplies. Using a cheap wall charger has a HUGE impact on the accuracy of the touch screen. I'm guessing Motorola didn't use any ferrites on the USB signals, allowing high frequency noise from an external supply to negatively impact the device. I suspect placing a ferrite on the USB cable near the phone end would minimize this issue, but have yet to try it myself. Instead, I just use quality chargers.

[disclamer: i'm working in touch-screen business but not for apple/cellphone company]

This test is biased as:- user perfomed, we use robot for this kind of qualification (but you can still get an overview if you use jigs)- strait lines are not the best to see if some king of trajectory filtering is done by the OS: use curve lines, or corners (to see over/undershoot)- to check if the border effect will affect the point perfomance, touch the screen at regularly spaced points (use a transparent plastic with dots printed on it)- it would be interesting to get the raw data sent from the touch sensor to check sampling rate & multi touch tracking (and thus removing, the OS and software filtering)

That said, when you are in front of a new touch sensor, the strait lines test on the border is a 'universal' benchmark performed by everyone in the field...

They are testing a first generation iPhone. This test is interesting, but not really useful. As some of the comments point out, diagonal lines really aren't the best indicator for accuracy when hitting links or whatever. As usual, the lack of consistency that comes from using a single human being comes into play. While you don't need a machine that always draws perfectly straight lines, you need a machine (or guide) that draws the same lines for each phone.

Some extra detail from the story. The iPhone has poor detection along the edges (basically flattens out diagonals into vertical or horizontal lines), the Nexus One has the best. Not that important as most UI elements aren't right at the edge anyways. The waviness in some of the tests suggests that the sensors or algorithms may be biased into vertical/horizontal motions (makes sense from a gesturing point of view).

If they really wanted to test how well the touchscreen reacts to hitting links and stuff, I don't see why they just don't go test that. Load up the same sites and keep track of how well it reacts to you hitting links. At the very least, if they wanted to do the drawing program test, it would make more sense to test what happens when you try to hit points, instead of drawing lines. So you could put some magic marker dots on the screen, and have the user hit them and look for the overlap or something.

All in all... shows off some interesting stuff. Suggests some interesting things about the behavior of the different touchscreens, but really not all too conclusive, and really points to further testing/refinement of procedure.

It seems to me that diagonal lines aren't that bad of a test actually. Just hitting links doesn't seem as good of a test, because the line test is more generalized. FTA:

Instead, the lines look jagged or zig-zag, no matter how slowly you go, because the sensor size is too big, the touch-sampling rate is too low, and/or the algorithms that convert gestures into images are too non-linear to faithfully represent user inputs.

From this, it looks like the line test actually does a good job of determining how accurate the touch screen is going to be overall.You can still say the person drawing the lines is inconsistent, but I'd say that's not a big deal, considering it's just an online article.

A more accurate way of testing this would be to use an x-y positioning device and test hitting specific areas of the screen and report back the x-y coordinates that were hit. Repeat over a few thousand points. Test for line drawing; view with optical scanner. Repeat test for equivalent of 3 years usage.

This would give you a valid measure of the accuracy of the screen decection and it's longevity. On wait a minute, the iPhone can't use a mechanical device but relies on the capacitance of the pointing devic

Actually, cap screens work with any conductor. I mean, hell, a hot dog works on a iPhone. You could use that in your mechanical device. Though a giant metal probe would also work. But the hot dog is more fun, and probably gives better results... a lot more like a finger.

Is it fair to compare the third generation of a product to new products out there right away ?

Fairess isn't an issue. Consumers are presented with various options today. They need to compare them today. We don't have to be worried about hurting the poor phones' (or manufacturers') feelings with the unfairness of it all.

I own an iPhone, and I can draw complex images with my finger, scrult a 3D sculpture with a particular program I have, and accurately type and click. I have nothing to compare it to but i know how accurate the iPhone is.

This is my biggest problem with my phone (a Moto Krave ZN4). I already had an iPod Touch, so figured "Hey, this touch screen thing is pretty cool. - I'll get one for my phone.". Didn't work out so great. While I can type away just fine on the iPod (I've started leaving my laptop home most of the time now since if I'm near a hotspot my iPod Touch does 98% of what I want to do on a laptop), on the Krave trying to do a text message on the onscreen QWERTY keyboard is just painful. Try to press one key - it registers the one beside it. Try to hit backspace. It registers a letter instead. Finally backspace across the two bad letters. Ok, now CAREFULLY try to press the letter I want. Nope, grabs the key beside it again. Not to mention the contacts list. I've just gotten used to apologizing to people because half the time when I tap a contact to call it calls the person next to them. This was particularly embarrassing when I was trying to call my brother at 4am over Christmas break because he overslept to go duck hunting - it the phone dialed one of the department directors at work which happens to be right next time him. After that I started prefixing all work contacts with #'s just so they'd stay away from my personal contacts on the list.

I'm not buying another touch screen phone now without testing it in person first to make sure it feels right.

PS Yes, I know the obvious answer would be to just get an iPhone but AT&T nor any other GSM carrier gets signal where I live.